In a career stuffed with highlights, one of Michael’s Jordan’s most memorable moments occurred in the 1997 NBA Finals, when he pushed his visiting Chicago Bulls past the Utah Jazz in a pivotal Game 5 that set him up for his fifth championship. In what would become known as the “Flu Game,” Jordan scored 38 points in a 90-88 win despite suffering from some sort of illness that appeared to leave him at far less than full strength.
In fact, the only thing about Jordan’s legendary performance that could be described as at “100%” is the certainty of his longtime personal trainer that the real culprit was a late-night pizza order.
“One hundred percent it was food poisoning, 100%,” the trainer, Tim Grover, said this week on the “Pardon My Take” podcast. “But obviously it just sounds better to be the ‘Flu Game’ than the ‘Food Poisoning Game.’ ”
As Grover recalled on that podcast and subsequently on another one, TNT’s “The Steam Room,” he was with Jordan at a hotel in Park City, Utah, where the Bulls were staying for their road games in the Finals against the Jazz. The night before Game 5, sometime after all the restaurants had closed, and after what he said was the hotel’s cutoff of about 9 p.m. for room service, Jordan got hungry.
Grover said he ordered a pizza, and five people came to deliver it to Jordan’s room.
“By then, everybody knew what room Michael was in, because we had already been there for a while,” Grover said.
That set off alarm bells for Grover, who told Jordan, “I have a bad feeling about this,” only to have his concerns dismissed by Jordan.
Grover said that of the several people in the hotel room at that time, including himself and a couple of security guards, no one else ate the pizza except the Bulls star. He said Jordan showed no signs of illness beforehand.
At about 3 a.m., though, Grover said he was summoned to Jordan’s room and discovered his most high-profile client “literally curled up in the fetal position.”
“I’ve not known any flu that can hit you that fast, but I know how quickly food poisoning can hit you,” he said, before recounting that he advised Jordan to throw up and then hydrate as much as possible.
“Just get me standing. I will do the rest,” Jordan declared, according to the trainer.
Grover said his advice to Jordan for Game 5 was: “If you’re going to play, you gotta keep going. . . . The worst thing that could happen is that you come out and rest for a long period of time.”
Sure enough, Jordan logged 44:17 of court time – his fourth-most in any playoff game that year – while adding seven rebounds, five assists and three steals to his game-high 38 points. His 13-of-27 shooting included a three-pointer with less than 30 seconds left that put the Bulls ahead for good.
“That was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” Jordan said afterward. “I almost played myself into passing out just to win a basketball game.”
Of his state of being during the wee hours in his hotel room, Jordan said in 2004, according to ESPN, “I was scared; I didn’t know what was happening to me. . . . I felt partially paralyzed.”
In a 2011 interview with ESPN, former Bulls coach Phil Jackson said guard Ron Harper also “always said that it was a bad pizza.”
More recently, Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, a Chicago teammate of Jordan’s during the 1996 to 1998 championship runs, said that a player in Jordan’s condition would now be prevented from taking the floor.
“We’re not taking that chance today,” Kerr said on the “Runnin’ Plays” podcast this month. “I guarantee you that. If that happened with Steph [Curry] or Klay [Thompson] or any of our players, no way we’re dealing with that.”
“[Jordan] had an IV at the shoot-around,” Kerr recalled. “We were at a high school in Park City, 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake, for that Finals game, and . . . he could barely move.”
A different theory that has been floated in the past suggests Jordan’s performance in Game 5 should really be called the “Hangover Game,” but Grover strongly pushed back against that in 2013.
“I was with him 24/7 during the whole thing, and we were definitely not going out, definitely not partying,” Grover said then of Jordan. “. . . You work too hard to get that close, [where] only one teams wins the championship, and Michael being the ultimate competitor, he’s never gonna put him in a situation where he can’t achieve the goal.”
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Bad pizza, not the flu, supposedly had Michael Jordan sick during 1997 NBA Finals - Boston.com
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